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Troubleshooting Poor Call Quality

Written by Marissa Orsini

Updated at March 11th, 2024

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Table of Contents

Obtain Basic Information Review Call Examples Investigate VoIPmonitor/QoS

Scope

Intended Audience: Channel Partners and higher

This article outlines the steps to follow when troubleshooting poor call quality.

 

Requirements

  • Access to Manager Portal 
     
  • Access to VoIPmonitor (White Label Partners or higher) 
     
  • Access to PingPlotter or PingPlotter Cloud
 

 

Obtain Basic Information

When investigating call quality complaints, it is important to gather as much detailed information as possible. Because voice traffic is passing through the internet, call quality is heavily dependent on the client's network, so the following information is needed to identify the root cause as quickly as possible.

  • Call Examples: List dates, times, and numbers involved
    NOTE: Call quality issues are best diagnosed while they are occurring. Call examples should be no more than 48 hours old. It is also important to gather call examples to or from multiple numbers. If calls to or from only one off-net number are impacted, it is likely the problem is with that number
  • Impact: Are all users affected? If not, which ones? Are all of the impacted users in one place or on one network? Does it occur 100% of the time, or is the behavior intermittent? 
  • Exact Behavior: What specifically is the client experiencing? One-way or no-way audio, choppy or garbled audio? Is it occurring on inbound calls, outbound calls, or both? Are internal (extension to extension calls) also impacted? How long has the behavior been happening?

Review Call Examples

  1. Log in to the Manager Portal 
  2. Navigate to Call History and filter for the call examples gathered above
  3. Check the QoS score of the call. The expected score is 4.5. However, lower scores indicate poor network quality on that side of the call. Make sure to check both scores
  4. Hover over each score and check the Jitter and Packet Loss for that leg of the call. The jitter should be under 100ms, and packet loss should be below 2%. If either score is above this number, there is likely latency occurring on that side of the call

Investigate VoIPmonitor/QoS

At this point, channel partners should escalate to support with the details gathered for further troubleshooting. White Label Partners may proceed troubleshooting using the steps below

  1. From the call history screen, click on the QoS score to open it in VoIPmonitor.
  2. Click on the play button to listen to the RTP session of the call
  3. Make sure to listen to both sides and verify whether the call quality issue is occurring.
    1. If either side is showing poor call quality, then the issue is with the audio the PBX is receiving on that side. On the client side, continue investigating. On the off-net side, escalate for investigation with the carrier
    2. If call quality is showing no signs of degradation, then the problem is occurring locally with the client, either their ISP, local network, or device
  4. For calls with one-way or no-way audio, click PCAP on the call to download a packet capture from the PBX. Check for RTP traffic from both IPs throughout the call. If RTP traffic is not occurring, check the client's network to ensure nothing is being blocked
  5. After reviewing all examples, if the behavior is determined to be with the carrier, escalate to support with the gathered information. If the behavior is occurring on the client side, White Label Partners may use PingPlotter to diagnose network issues or escalate to support for use of PingPlotter Cloud

 

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